Status Updates From The Black Lizard Big Book o...

Just finished “The Twelfth Statue” by Stanley Ellis. It’s not on goodreads on its own so I’ll review it here. One of the best stories in this book so far! Also one of the longest. The characters were interesting and well constructed, and the solution was CREEPY as anything!!

Finished “The Crewel Needle” by Gerald Kersh. WOW. A good, creepy story, and wonderfully told. I enjoyed the conversational tone in this one a lot.

Couldn’t find an edition of “The Department of Impossible Crimes” by James Yaffe. Hey, it’s wake up dead man, just a lot less interesting. I really couldn’t stand the detective’s whole shtick in this one. Paul Dawn puts on a superior persona but really doesn’t have anything to back it up with, except for being able to get the right answer through the magic of logic.

Couldn’t find an edition of “The Wrong Problem” by John Dickson Carr. I have been wanting to read Carr because of Wake Up Dead Man, but haven’t yet gotten my hands on a copy of “The Hollow Man/The Three Coffins” yet. This one was quite good, although lands in the “solutions that make you say “huh”” category rather than a solution that really satisfied.

I’ll log all the short stories IN the book separately, and justify logging this book as well on the grounds that I cannot find a publication “The Two Bottles of Relish” on its own. So it doesn’t throw off my count, which remains honest, and allows me to DNF any story IN the book, as well as keep track of which stories are there.